I fully respect you and your opinion. I adamantly disagree with it. The main problem is children are murdered in schools because the murderers have easy access to the children. Everything else is peripheral. Nobody should be able to park their car on a road adjacent to a school and be able to just walk onto campus to murder children and teachers. Hard perimeter barrier with a secure entry point.Originally Posted by Hambo
This observation is the beginning and end of it. This needs to be answered. It has everything to do with people and nothing else.
Whoa. I initially read this as, ''I also was on the firing squad, and had a Garand in my closet at home and later also a 1911 my senior year when I started shooting hardball.''
Tough high school.
I gotta slow down or get some better 'readers'.
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
This.
We know this shit is gonna happen. Protecting the kids doesn't require fucking with the Constitution. Only money. And yet...
Until recently, I thought the same thing. I was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._(before_2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._United_States
Circumstances vary, but it this sort of thing is not as 'new' as we would like to believe.
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
There was not a time when this "didn't happen." There was a time when it was less common and received less attention but these are "people" issues and people haven't really changed, we have simply magnified and unintentionally rewarded various forms of deviant behavior.
On May 18, 1927, a man named Andrew Kehoe blew up the school in Bath Township, Mich. Most of the 44 killed were children. It remains the deadliest attack on a school in U.S. history. It is also regularly left out of accounts of terrorism in America.
Kehoe, an electrician, had previously worked on the school and had rigged explosives through the buildings in the weeks leading up to the attack. His timer device in one part of the building failed, so children in those rooms survived. In the immediate aftermath of the school explosion, Kehoe set off another bomb in his car, killing himself and several others nearby. Prior to the school explosion, he had murdered his wife and set his own farm on fire. His motive was anger at a foreclosure on his farm, and the taxes levied by the township to pay for the new school.
https://www.chds.us/ssdb/charts-graphs/
That's absolutely not true. The number of actual "active shooter" situations in schools has actually remained fairly consistent over the years. The number of non active shooter incidents has increased dramatically
To perform these types of mass casualty events you need people and a weapon.
If people haven’t “really changed” and guns aren’t the issue then, what is the issue?
If the Bath tragedy took place in 1927 and then Columbine in 1999, then from 2010 on it is damn near every other month depending on how you define things ( location , number dead). Not just school shootings, major mass casualty events.
Something has changed.
Last edited by fixer; 05-25-2022 at 09:07 AM.
I think there is a Tactics, Techniques and Procedures problem, and it will never go back in the box.
It is in the public imagination now that certain weapons are better than others for killing lots of people. They are aware than ARs are powerful compared to handguns, can fire longer between reloads (supposing standard capacity magazines), work better against armor and are easier to get hits compared to handguns.
We had mass shooters in days gone by, they killed plenty of people, but many did not optimize their weapons like they could have.
You can't undo this awareness on the part of the population. You can't get rid of the weapons, even if one wanted to (I don't). Even if we control for other factors, I have a feeling we are going to be unable to prevent the occurrence of these more lethal events.
We might be able to reduce the frequency somewhat. But chasing low probability, high impact events is hard. The spending on and fielding of barriers and armed assets in schools IS drastically more than it was 15 years ago. Schools ARE harder targets. Still happening. Still driving us mad.
My opinion is worth what you paid for it but I've read the pro literature and gone to presentations at pro conferences. I think:
1. We are seeing more rage inducing cultural trends without the dampers of good family structures. While there are different sort of families, the lack of a solid structured family - one part being lack of fathers, is producing rage in kids. Causes for the lack of families can be detestably tied to the destruction of decent jobs for average folks. IIRC correctly, in city locales where manfacturing jobs left, single families went from 25% to 75%. So much for the Flat Earth globalization.
2. The social media, copy cat effect is real. The kids being caught before carrying out an attack and the ones who did show clear studying of past attacks. As I said before - these encourage the behavior through an effect called vicarious reinforcement of social learning theory. The effects of the attacks (meaning see the harm done) and publicity fuel the fantasy of what will happen for you, even if you suicide. They also give hints and technique lessons.
3. So, the Follman book suggests, we are seeing an increase in rage - it has perhaps two foci which don't have to be independent. One being personal rage against an institution (where you were mistreated or representing such an institution) and/or a politically, racist, ethnic focus for rage. In the latter case, social media and politicians feed that rage, I have to say.
Guns, complex issue. Yes, more deadly weapons are available. However accessibility hasn't increased. When I was a kid, the Macy's in Brooklyn, NY had barrels of WWII surplus rifles in sporting goods. While not as fast firing, you could have done significant damage with them.
There is a debate whether the presence of guns primes aggression - that's a mixed literature. The antigun folks would suggest that a normal person might be driven over the age by gun presence. However, as in the Remington trial, some argue the gun ads and media focus techniques for the rage. Some consequences:
The idea of calling the AR pattern guns - modern sporting rifles was and certainly now will be seen as ridiculous.
Bitching that they are not assault rifles isn't a useful counterpoint. Yes, they are not fully auto and I see that media is calling the military style semi auto guns as they picked up on the assault rifle complaint at times. Same with bitching about clips vs. magazines. The issue is capacity and the claim that limited mags let you charge the shooter (which has happened).
About potential legislation - that's for a different day.
PS - If I were a gun company or accessory company I would tone down the blood lust advertising. We see suits against gun companies, and you can bet Uvalde will atttract some lawyers. I posted this before from an ad:
When the intended target is a fourth grade class - do you want this sort of ad? There are cases were jurors clearly discussed the use of hollow points (not just Fish) as implying lethal and crazed intent as compared to a self-defense orientation.From Wilson Combat
Lehigh Maximum Expansion bullets expand with razor sharp petals positioned and maintained at the largest diameter to provide the greatest cutting surface. The expansion process of Lehigh's technology is unique from that of a traditional lead jacketed bullet that expands when it comes in contact with a hard surface – we designed these bullets to expand in the vital zone of your intended target
Last edited by Glenn E. Meyer; 05-25-2022 at 10:08 AM.
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